Silk

Welcome, @Moshi! Glad to have you on board. I am, personally, completely hopeless at drawing, but we have a few artist types on here so you are certainly in good company there. As for writing, well, you're preaching to the converted on the joys thereof As a critique group we're mostly geared towards revising for publication but you are absolutely welcome, of course, to submit your stuff. When you do get around to submitting, feel free to let us know where you'd like us to focus our feedback and we'll critique accordingly! And, I don't think we have you on the group mailing list. Whenever you want to hop on that, send @Robinski and myself a PM with your email so we can add you, as that's what allows you to receive others' submissions and participate in the group. No obligation to critique while you're not submitting but it IS a useful way to get oriented to the group.

This is why we have the "WRS" acronym! I suspect that's a large part of it, yes. Did we have his last name in the prologue before? If not, that might help. I think that as an introduction to the character, what we see here works just fine. It pretty much gives me the information that I need to know: he's a powerful character, he's kind of insufferable, and he's proooobably (I say probably because if I'd picked this up off the shelf, I wouldn't be able to just message you with "I'm allowed to hate him, right?" XD) an antagonist. So, I don't think we're losing anything in terms of seeing G as he is now. What we do lose from the prologue is the sense of transformation. So sense of transformation is important, for the character for both G and J, or for the social/political milieu of the world in general, and can't be gotten across in other ways, then the prologue is more worth keeping around, IMO.

One of the things that the original prologue did well was invoking the trance-like feeling the character was experiencing and her breaking out of it. This chapter feels much much more detached emotionally. “Every time, she was awakened to the horror…” “She was about to go go back to carrying her rock.” So I was good with her waking up out of the trance in the prologue because it seemed so clear that it was very brief before she was drawn back into whatever was happening. That doesn’t seem to be happening here, so I’m wondering why waking up into this hellscape doesn’t seem more distressing or surprising to her, and if she’s no longer whatever mental compulsion the trance imposed on her, why is she still considering going back to her duties as if nothing was amiss? I would like a little more description of whatever is happening with the golden people. This all feels very sparse and I don’t have a good picture of what’s going on. “This is my chance/this was her chance” repetition at the top of p2 “...with miniscule blond hair” not sure how to parse “miniscule” in this context “That’s not possible… she must have been here” So a lot what J is saying here feels info-dumpy, very “as you know, Bob” type dialogue. “On a sadder note this may be…” I think you can do some playing around with remarks like this to make the POV character’s perspective much clearer. If it’s really the first time she’s had a drink without ash in it she probably wouldn’t have the framework to appreciate that it’s said. It seems more likely to me that she would try it and be startled by the fact that it was different and better. This could be a fun and useful way to play around with what she does and doesn’t understand as a result of her telepathy, because I’m still struggling to figure out what comes from her telepathy and what comes from her perspective. Top of p 5 “the spot her pierced her bleeding” can’t quite parse what this sentence is going for, but it needs to be revisited. It is very strange to me that the group is having this conversation in front of her. It shows a pretty blatant disregard for her as a person, which might be deliberate, but the level of detail in their explanations about her powers also still feels very “as you know Bob/maid and butler” to me. Also a little leery that we seem to have another Extremely Special person with Extremely Special abilities on board. And since I don’t understand what any of these things actually mean, it’s not giving me anything to get invested with in terms of the context of the world. P8 “How did you know that would work?” Also curious as to what suddenly resolved her (very reasonable) hesitancy. Also, my understanding is it takes skill to properly give someone an injection, it’s definitely not as simple as just breaking the skin in the right spot. “We normally give freed slaves number nicknames…” This seems unsavoury. So J is just kind of a jerk, yes? So W says both that where T goes is up to her, and that she doesn’t have much choice in joining them, directly contradicting themselves. I also don’t have a ton of sympathy for the “we freed you from slavery and now you have to do what we want, but it’s okay because you’re better off than if you went off on your own” argument. Which is fine if that’s what you’re going for, but I’m certainly not invested in the success of this revolution at the moment. “I know what it is!” Yeah, okay, I’m here for T yelling at her rescuers/new captors. Overall: I think there’s an interesting character idea here in terms of T having absorbed some stuff through telepathy but otherwise having had her personality and experience etc. suppressed, but more work is needed to really nail the voice. We get a ton of worldbuilding in this chapter, to the point where I had trouble following all of the terms, etc floating around. A couple of suggestions as far as worldbuilding goes: I think it needs to be more spread out so that we don’t end up with a couple chapters whose primary purpose ends up being just to explain a whole bunch of things about the setting, and I think it needs to be a little less focused on the details of MH and all the rest of it and give us a bit of a broader picture. What does it mean that she has … whatever abilities these are? The details can come after we have some pegs to hang them on. I still don’t have any sense of where the overall story is going, and this far in, it’s needed. I certainly don’t need all the answers, but what is the central conflict and how is this connected to it? Is the central conflict the revolution? If so, what does the character from the first few chapters have to do with it? Who should I be rooting for? Etc. Seconding both of these. I would have been fine with this, I think, if we hadn't already gotten so much of it in the form of all these characters talking over her. It's brief and reasonably set up. But because we've already gotten a bunch of it, I did do a bit of an internal groan at this. Agree. Seconded on all counts. Edit: It's worth noticing, I think, that my "overall" comments would look a little different if this were a first or second chapter. In that case, tune down the infodumping and nail the voice/perspective and you've got a pretty strong Ch1 or Ch2, and "there's a revolution" would probably be enough in terms of central conflict to keep going. But because we're 11 chapters in, I definitely need more than "there's a revolution" to keep me going.

So we have @kais, @Snakenaps and @karamel up for Monday,

You're most welcome! I hope it was helpful! I actually like this idea, on its own, it's the combination of the counter-culture/cult thing with a character who happens to have a mental illness, which happens to manifest as violence. I shifting C's intrusive thoughts to something non-violent will help a lot here. And, if there's room for it, possibly setting this this religion up a bit more so that it's clearly counter-culture as opposed to a cult. There's a distinct difference there, but not clear from the little information we have which one applies. ...you have my sincere apologies. Oh yeah, him! Well then, I will go ahead and pat myself on the back for disliking him all along. And I get to continue to do so! Hooray!

Overall: I’ll echo the comments that I found these two chapters way more engaging than the first few you submitted. Voice was clearer, the sense of personal stakes was there, and while the big-picture sense of stakes maybe wasn’t quite, I think there’s probably an easy fix – see my comments about the finance bit below (and the fact that we’ve skipped several chapters is likely contributing as well). My biggest struggle was reconciling what seemed to be a chapter with very scifi-feeling tech with previous chapters which seemed to be standard Renaissance-ish period fantasy. It may be, again, a product of missing some of the earlier chapters – maybe A and S were just in more remote areas? - but there needs to be some more setup on what level of technology is available, how common it is, and how magic and technology interact. Female POV critiques: I didn’t notice much that was “off,” to be honest, though the devil is always in the details on these things and I freely admit that 10 months of pandemic-sized workloads seems to be affecting my ability to do close readings. I’ll second all the specific instances that others have called out (including “friendzone,” ugh). If you really had to call out someone’s lips specifically, perhaps “full” lips would be a less awkward descriptor? And yes, as someone pointed out, people who suffer from anorexia often take great pains to hide it. Signifiers that others have suggested such as fatigue, baggy clothes, etc. might help cue an astute reader that something is amiss but it’s certainly not something you can identify at a glance. C might think this of course, and I think that @kaishas the right of it in thinking that your POV character can be fairly blunt about her perception of other women and their physical features, but it’s most likely not going to be in a sexually objectifying way. The comment about making sure she’s looking at other genders in the same level of detail is a good one too, though of course the specifics of what she notices are going to chance depending on a bunch of things. Worth keeping in mind, too, that the specifics about what your characters notice and how they handle body image will be different if you’re portraying a culture where body image doesn’t have the same cultural currency that it does in most Western cultures today. Religion: No real comment here. I agree with those who’ve said it seems mostly Christian-like in scope. Mental health: First I need to note that I do not have lived experience in this area. I haven’t done much research on the specific thing you’re portraying, and the research that I’ve done in other areas is somewhat stale. So, grain of salt definitely needed. That said – this landed better for me than it did for some of the others. It was immediately clear to me that this was someone experiencing intrusive thoughts, along the lines of some people’s experience Obsessive Compulsive Order. (Please note that this is very distinct from sociopathy or psychopathy, which refer to an inability to care for or tendency to be downright destructive towards others, and incidentally used to be classed as different disorders but were I think folded under one cluster of symptoms in the DSM-V. Not that the DSM-V is at all perfect, either!) My understanding is that these can be violent, can come more or less out of nowhere, and can be very difficult to stop thinking about. But I don’t feel qualified to comment what’s portrayed here other than that I understood the intent. And … @shatteredsmooth makes a very good point. This is going to be a very tricky line to walk because there is such powerful stigma associated with mental illness, in no small part because we’re saturated with media that portrays people with mental illness (as if it were one thing we could just lump together) as violent and dangerous. I understand the difference, academically, between intrusive thoughts and much more common things like anxiety and depression, but not all readers will. To the extent that this worked for me, it was because it was clear to me that her thoughts were unwanted, and because C did not act on her intrusive thoughts or seem particularly likely to do so, except for when she approached the automaton. That said, do C’s intrusive thoughts need to be violent ones or can they be something else? If you feel strongly about moving forward with C’s intrusive thoughts in their current form, a few suggestions: It felt like the intrusive thoughts C was feeling, aside from mostly having violence in common, were a bit of everything and the kitchen sink. I don’t know if this is a common experience so more research would definitely be required before implementing this, but I wonder if her having a specific thought that repeated, or had some recognizable permutations, would make her read as less indiscriminately violent. Relatedly, make sure you’re clear on what experiences you are and are not portraying. I noted a few comments from the others along the lines of “this seems more like…” and while co-morbidities certainly happen – I’m not a fan of the overly clinical language but it’s what I have – lumping too many things together is not going give you a respectfully portrayed character. Keeping the difference between mental health and neurodiversity top of mind is a good call-out too. Can you assign her some specific coping mechanisms that can demonstrate that she is in control of her actions? Content note on the next two bullets for discussion of self-harm: My initial read of V-ism that it was fringe and maybe even kind of cult-y. The scene between D and C at the service makes me wonder if maybe that's not correct, but immediately having the impression that the character with mental illness was part of a cult definitely contributes to mental health stigma, IMO. Sounds obvious, but research will be very important here, and not just around the actual experiences of people who live with this type of thing, but make sure you are very aware of the tropes regarding characters with mental illnesses in fiction, and make sure your character doesn’t fall into them. As I read: Start of this sub is giving me a considerably different impression of the time period than the previous subs did. “Human trials” and – funny though it may sound – “clipboard” were very jarring to read as I suddenly felt like I was in a much more modern period than the previous subs. Is there some setup that happens in the chapters we didn’t see that provides some ground work for this? P3 “The engineers screamed and…” this description is hitting me a bit oddly. I think because it presents the folks in attendance as very uniform in their panic. Very minor, but a stumbling block nonetheless. So I would not except a reanimated automaton to be able to talk or reason, but nobody seems surprised so far by the fact that that’s what this one appears to be doing. Bad assumption on my part? P4, again, finding what seems to be a sudden transition from period fantasy to Evangelion-style scifi to be somewhat jarring (even though I’m assuming that the suits are powered by magic). Definitely needs to be some setup for the level of technology in the world, and how magic and technology interact, before now. “...begin to redevelop its original personality.” I think the time to get this information is probably before automatons started running around having opinions about things, to provide more context around people’s reactions to this. And… is this common? If so, why was it allowed to happen in the first place? Is our impressively-dressed friend who just burst through the ceiling the sinister caped guy from the prologue? I’m getting bad-guy vibes again. And he shut the automaton down, so... “Check the finance department” feels like a bit of a let-down, tbh. At least all on its own. I really hope this mech didn’t come back to life just to warn me that Joe in Accounting was skimming 5% off the top. “She knew he was only thirty-five…” Can I hit him? Please? (I am rooting hard for this guy to be an antagonist.) So I had originally had the impression that C’s religion was fringe whereas D’s religion was fairly mainstream. If that’s a good assumption, though, it seems unlikely that C would be quite this ignorant of a more mainstream religion that people in her own family follow. To the extent that it feels info-dumpy, it was because I started with that assumption that D’s religion was a mainstream one and I couldn’t understand why C didn’t know most of this. I think I was also mentally coding it as Christian, and assuming some of the cultural ubiquity that comes with it. As a conversation between two people, it actually reads fairly naturally.

Hmm. I definitely think starting with the outbreak could be more engaging, and give us something to get invested in as we see what changes. That said, it definitely feels so far like the story that's been promised is a plague/cure narrative, and and I think it's right to worry that starting with the outbreak might might underscore this. If the story is more about the unexpected consequences that happen after the vaccine, what happens if you skip ahead to when those political changes start happening?

I’m definitely somewhat curious as to why these people are wandering about through what appears to be an apocalypse, but I think there needs to be a much stronger sense of urgency to really pull me through this chapter. By the second or third page I was already getting antsy to get some sense of stakes, whether that’s a sense of external danger or emotional stakes or whatever it was. The first few pages read as very reflective, which isn’t itself a bad thing, but as very detached, so I’m not as pulled into K’s world and situation as I would want. My sense of detachment increased as I kept reading – K and N seem to be potentially afraid of this woman as they contemplate running from her, but again, the visceral sense of fear or danger isn’t really there. I judged the characters a little bit for their first reaction to be think about running away rather than helping. That could be a pretty telling detail, but the way this woman is not presented as particularly threatening, and the fact that the characters have seemed pretty detached, makes them look like they are not the best people. The fact that they agree to kill this woman definitely adds to that. They don’t put up much of a fight about it and the focus seems to be on the emotional wounds much more than the physical ones, so it’s hard to swallow the apparent line of reasoning that this is in any way necessary or laudable. I’m wondering if the detached feel is a deliberate effect – it certainly feels like it could be a way of expressing trauma or loss or what-have-you. But if so, I think we need to feel that trauma or loss a little more deeply than we do to make it work. Right now I’m having trouble caring about the characters because the characters themselves don’t seem to care about anything. Zombies! Okay, so now there is more conflict which is good, but I think the zombie story and encounter with M in general comes too late for an inciting incident. If this is the moment where things change, we need to get to it sooner. Also… is this thing about zombies new information to K and N? I had the impression that yes, it is, but they don’t seem to be very startled by it. On the other hand, if this is NOT new information then they are awfully cavalier about all these dead bodies. Overall: I think there is an interesting start to a story in here, for sure, but I need more emotion from the characters to buy into it and really even to understand the context in which they are wandering through an empty wasteland full of dead people. I think a little more information about what happened and why the world is the way it is would be very helpful too. A couple writing things I’ve noticed: the tense seems to shift frequently between past and present. This chapter is a bit overwritten – there are some really great lines and clear images, but also a lot of adjectives. An example of one I actually stumbled on was “small sun faded houses” but it’s mostly that there’s a lot of them.

It’s been a while since I read the original trilogy, and I’ve gotta admit I have not yet read book 4 ☹ too many things happening! But with that caveat out of the way, the tone seems consistent to my view, I’m enjoying S’s POV and interacting with N and Y in from that perspective, and yes I would definitely like to know more about why this planet just up and exploded thank you. There was only one paragraph that struck me as a little infodumpy, which I have duly flagged below. Comments are light because draft zero and I’m dreadfully behind, but as I read: “three planets had repeated mention, and P, the most,” draft zero and all but I stumbled on this sentence. “…buried under news reports” Uh, does a planet hosting nine sentient species just up and exploding one day really get buried? I love the way you name your ships. “She shouldn’t have been poking around in archival records” that’s the fault of whomever left the restricted records open for people to poke around in, I’d say. “He had five fingers and toes…” is… is S a bit of a xenophobe? Because that’s the vibe this comment gives me. “Survived several wars… and the perpetual smell of Y’s coffee” hah. “When they’d all managed to return to A…” this is the only bit of recap that strikes me as a little infodumpy. This “OH HAI I SAW YOU IN THE DATABASE” has me envisioning this secret database with Google-Docs-style notifications of who is viewing it. I am suspicious of the timing of this message. I know S was in the database because of the explosion, but this seems to me (from what we’re getting) to be information that P could have provided at any time. SUSPICIOUS I say. I am getting an absolute kick out of N being described as so … pretty. I couldn’t tell you why, exactly, but I am just delighted with N and his midnight blue ringlets. Bottom of p7 “galactic incidence” should be “incident” The (I’m assuming) yes/no tongue clicks made sense on the comms, but now that she, N and Y are all face to face, surely S has more sophisticated ways to communicate than being stuck with yes/no questions? On the other hand, I do love this “we’re at the ‘wordless communication’ stage of our relationship” dynamic that comes across so very clearly in the last page or so. I... I kind of assumed this was code for drugs, for some reason. Should I have assumed this was code for drugs? This is a good call, I think. Obviously my opinion is coloured because I've read the first trilogy, but I think this is part of why that one paragraph struck me as infodumpy: how much do we actually need the information we got? I'm not sure this makes you uncultured...

Hooray! Action and tension! This is definitely a welcome and needed change to the pacing so far. I think my biggest hurdle is swallowing some of the character motivations, especially S’s decision at the end of the chapter. More below. As I read: “…every inch a dangerous Revolutionary” We haven’t seen much in the way of action, let alone military action, from the Revolutionaries so far, so this reads more like S romanticizing what they’re doing. Which is fine and good if that’s what you’re going far; S certainly seems like the kind of character who might have stars in her eyes about this sort of thing. Why are they still distributing pamphlets? Isn’t the job more or less done now? “the shipyard echoed with gunshot” no calls to surrender, intimidation tactics, etc? Also, gunshots are not a great way to employ non-lethal force. Also: This is a rather quick response from the BK’s people. Since this is not a military action which might have been more likely to give the game away, it seems a bit weird that they are so quickly met with military force. This may be a deliberate reflection of the Revolutionaries being actually rather naïve, which they definitely seem to be and which I’m now fairly confident you’re doing deliberately, but even in that context S wondering why the BK’s people would want to capture rather than kill them seems like the answer should be really obvious. I am having … some kind of feeling about T and S so easily abandoning their kids to do more seditious things, and I honestly can’t decide whether my suspension of disbelief is actually suffering or whether I just like them less. Regardless, I do think this kind of decision could be built up to have more impact than it does. I think it’s lacking some punch because S has been mostly a secondary character up to this point, and has functioned more as a foil for Ir than as a family character, if that distinction makes sense. P6 “Despite their different upbringings…” but he was just thinking about how their upbringings were similar because they both grew up in proximity to the fey. P6/7 “…remember meeting much younger…” missing word here p7 “among gore” should probably be “amidst” “W gazed softly…” I don’t know how to parse “softly” in this context. The BK seemed much calmer and more in control the last time we saw him on screen. I’m definitely enjoying watching him throw a temper tantrum, but curious if this is unusual for him or not since he’s not been presented that way up until now. Neither Wo nor the general seem to react to him randomly throwing chairs around, though, which suggests this is normal. I’m not entirely sure what it is that’s throwing me off, but I keep reading this scene thinking General W is the POV when it’s actually Wo. “I refuse to let the Revolutionaries take B back before…” Okay, I’m loving the before and that we’re finally getting hints of the BK’s actual aim here (though I think we should probably have more by now). But I’m also wondering if it’s that plausible that the BK might lose the city. There are protests/riots, but the only remotely military actions we’ve seen so far are the revolutionaries attempting to defend themselves after distributing the flyers, and the assassination attempt at the beginning. Little confused by the last scene with S and how it fits into the one that starts on p12. Is this immediately after the first scene with her this chapter or is it later? She and T joined the protest, but are also somehow slowing down the soldiers going after the revolutionaries? Part of it may be my general confusion about the last scene and where it exactly falls in the narrative, but S seems to come to a very momentous conclusion in the last few pages of this sub based on not… not a whole heck of a lot. Unless I am really misreading, the riots were literally part of the plan, so it can’t have been a surprise that the BK’s army/law enforcement arm would come in to quell the resistance. So I am really having trouble understanding how we got from this being, presumably, part of the plan to “this is not working.” Did some part of the Revolutionaries’ plan get foiled somehow? If so, I need a better understanding of what actually went wrong. Is this S having a rude awakening to what it means to be a revolutionary? Or alternatively is this her zealotry, which we’ve gotten hints of, rising to the fore and making her a truly radicalized character? If it’s a character piece, I think we need more setup of S’s arc early on to help swallow this, because especially juxtaposed with General W being presented as pretty reasonable and level-headed, it seems like quite a leap. On the other hand it DEFINTIELY makes for a nice dramatic end to the chapter. I'm just not quite bought all the way in.

You did, but if I'd acknowledged that I noticed, I wouldn't have been able to give you a hard time about it.

Just going to conveniently not ask whether you were tagging me as a musician, or as an "old folks"... Ahem. AMH: Not much to comment about this one, honestly. The images and the narrative are pretty clear. Some of the contractions (“o’er” being one example) and the order of the words definitely invokes an archaic feeling, but I suspect that’s entirely what you’re going for. I did stumble a bit on the second line, rhythm-wise; it has a few too many syllables and feels a little crammed in there. Hard to get away with because the rest of the poem is so consistent rhythmically – I think this is the only place that gets away from the “three lines of four iams/one line of three iams per stanza” format. The first line of the first two stanzas sets up, at least potentially, the expectation of repetition in that first line of each stanza that isn’t carried through the rest of the piece. But I think the meter here is strong enough to carry you through without. “I’d through swamps…” in the second last stanza – missing word on this line? Perhaps delete “through” and replace with something like “travel,” which would preserve the meter? (Iambs and all!) Jack: Some beautiful images and powerful lines here. To the extent that there’s a narrative, it’s obscure by design I suspect, but it does feel a little more buried than needed. There is an emotional sameness here that I think makes it a little hard to follow the whole way through, especially as some of the individual lines suggest (to this reader’s mind, anyway) that there should be some sort of emotional progression. Right now, I feel more or less the same at the end of the poem as I did at the beginning – which is not a problem in and of itself, of course, but I’m left with the nagging feeling that I’m supposed to be feeling something different at the end and just missed a signal somewhere. Only other comment is that the last few stanzas suddenly seem to become a bit uncomfortable with the lack of rhyme scheme, and suddenly start trying to rhyme in a few places. Of course, sometimes you will just have lines that happen to end with the same sound, but it happens enough in the last few stanzas that it’s quite noticeable. The Editor: This one had me giggling the whole way through. I’m only not gonna record it because I think you should. But! Second verse, the rhyme scheme is off: lines four and eight should rhyme, and “goodbye” and “done” … uh… don’t. Going to be pretty noticeable, I think; even if it wasn’t a well known song, the first verse sets up the rhyme scheme for the second. Worst comes to worst, you could just use the last line from the original. Changing it would be more fun, but it’d work just fine. Same is true, honestly, for cut/done in the chorus, but it’s a different melody than the verse obviously so I think you can get away with it here… doesn’t mirror the rhyme scheme of the original, but, parody! “Shred it/edit” is absolutely fantastic btw. Standout set of lines. “Bleeding in the margins” is a near second. Third verse: “to die in your sleep” since this is exactly the same as the original, maybe something more writerly is in order for this couplet?

Almost full with @kais, @Snakenaps, @ginger_reckoning and @Aspiring Writer for tomorrow. And yes, @ginger_reckoning, totally fine - submit what you think will be most useful to you.

Generally speaking, I'm happy to have discussions, clarify critiques, answer questions, brainstorm, try to weigh in on whether a particular solution you're working on or a particular payoff down the line might work for me, that sort of thing. But I can't debate someone's story with them; all I can do is tell someone what I experienced and it's up to them to address it.

Ideally, most if not all of your scenes will be doing double or triple duty to move the plot and build character, relationships, setting, etc. In this case, though, the first 6 chapters have provided a lot of action scenes, but not an overarching sense of plot thus far, i.e. the central conflict (even if in broad strokes) and why it matters. So being able to move things forward at the same time as establishing character and relationship is important, even more so here because it's something that I as a reader feel like I've been lacking so far in the first 6 chapters. True, but I am also going to have difficulty caring about the characters when I don't have the sense that they are going to be tested by the plot. Something to consider in moving the plot forward is how to provide more information to the readers even when the characters don't have the full picture yet. A beginning where the characters don't understand what is happening yet can certainly work if readers have a better understanding of the bigger picture, but right now we have characters with incomplete information and no way to widen the scope. Nobody has said that you can't start with an immoral character. What I've said, and an experience that others on this forum are saying they've also had (personally, I rarely read others' critiques until I've written my own) is that I find this character both a. unlikeable, which is not necessarily a problem, and b. if this were not a critique group setting, a barrier to continuing to read your book, which is a problem. There are multiple ways you can address that, one of which might be starting with a different character, one of which might be making this character more likeable. But there are other solutions, like giving us more reasons to care about him. It's even possible the solution might be leaving Q as-is, which is fine if you can reduce the other barriers that your readers experience enough to make putting with Q, in their taste, worth it. Are there really cool powers that some people might be willing to read for? Then let's see them more clearly on the page, enough that we can understand and appreciate them. Is a really clever, dramatic, or otherwise compelling plot that will drag us forward even if we don't like one or more of the POV characters? Then let's see it. Same is true in reverse - people might be just fine starting with an amoral character but will experience significant barriers because they can't sink their teeth into what the plot is. It's not that there is one true solution that everyone who is responding to your work thinks you should implement, but the fact that everyone here is experiencing your book in a similar way should suggest that there are things in your manuscript you should take a look at. We tend to avoid being prescriptive on here precisely because it is the writer's job to figure out how to deal with the advice that you get, which can mean a lot of different things. There are two major areas where I get frustrated reading people responding to critiques. One is when people start being argumentative. You've said that you "challenge" critiques. I try to assume everyone is acting in good faith, but when I read your responses to critiques it often does read like an argument. If you are getting advice that you really, truly don't think will work for your story, ask yourself what you are looking to accomplish by responding to tell us that it won't work. Did somebody misread something? Maybe they misread it, or maybe you weren't clear enough. Does the information come up later? It may, but that doesn't mean it isn't a problem for the reader right now. Maybe it is something that can be foreshadowed, or a lantern hung on it, or maybe it really a minor thing that somebody could read over in a published book. But responding to someone to tell them why the thing they've identified isn't a problem, instead of drilling down deeper into why it's an issue for them or even if it's something that needs to be addressed in that particular moment - as most of us are striving to give the most complete picture of our experience of the ms that we can - quickly becomes off-putting, and makes me want to spend less time on my critiques; after all, if the writer frequently responds to say they already thought of that, do they really need my input? The second thing that often causes me a lot of frustration is watching people who read the advice but don't seem to want to take it, or when it seems like someone is only willing to address the easy fixes. I know you've changed things in response to comments on here - and that's great, I'm glad they were helpful. But when someone is only responding to the small or easy things I start to wonder why I'm spending time trying to provide advice or reactions on the big-picture problems. You've said things like changing Q's personality would be a huge change to the story and be a huge amount of work... but inevitably, I or someone else will identify something that will be a lot of work to change. That is literally impossible to avoid in the writing and revising process. You've also said on at least a couple of occasions that something will be addressed in later chapters, and I am sure that all things you do mention as "coming up later" will actually do so, but sometimes in order for the thing that comes up later to work right, it needs to be addressed structurally and systemically, and dismissing it as something that will be explained later reads as an unwillingness to do that work. It may be that I've totally misjudged your responses, and it happens! I hope that I have, and that you're taking this all to heart and finding it helpful. But I have no way to judge that other than by what I see here on the forum, and I'd be lying if I said it hasn't made me feel a bit hesitant about how I spend my time. So, while I won't claim to speak for anyone other than myself, perhaps my experience can help provide a little insight into why you're getting some pushback.

Not at all! Looks like we have @karamel, @Snakenaps and @Aspiring Writer for Monday.

I can kind of see the merits of both ways here. It's definitely not something I've seen too often in straight up science fantasy. It was a great end to Chapter 4 and felt like a good place to take a break, but it DID make a rockier start to chapter 5 as I was expecting some time to have passed or something to have changed. That said, this might be fairly easy to tweak - Chapter 5 could be like 5 minutes later and he'd found a hiding spot that he's just now been flushed out of, or something along those lines.

A passing reference like the one in this sub is probably fine, though it never hurts. I was thinking more of the first sub, which doesn't get in-depth but it is referenced quite frequently. It's definitely not to my personal taste, but it is definitely used in some genres, particularly thrillers I think, so I'd say it depends on where you see the book fitting structurally and in terms of genre. Sounds good. This became apparent to me after Q realized that it couldn't choose who it possessed, but was not clear before then. Fair. This is one of the reasons I like asking questions, assuming I have good ones to ask. You'll notice whenever I get around to subbing that I tend to be pretty quiet in terms of responses unless I need more information, personally, but yes, it took some getting used to. One of the ways I've made it less weird for myself is just by tagging people to acknowledge their crits.

Quick notes: I read the first 3 chapters, just didn’t crit them because I saw a comment saying you’d already revised. Also, make sure to tag your subs with D whenever you submit something depicting drug use. While I wrote my critique before I read the other comments, I’ve now skimmed through some of them and can perhaps offer some advice on how to deal with conflicting critiques, because that is going to happen as long as you’re part of any critique group. Each reader here or wherever else you’ve received critique is telling you how they’ve experienced your story, so it’s not a matter of deciding which critiques are “right” and which are “wrong.” There are lots of reasons why you might get different reactions. In (rare, in my experience) cases, it might be a simple matter of somebody not being the right audience. More usually, it’s a bit more complex with that. With each specific story element comes innumerable reasons why different people might resonate more or less strongly with different parts of the same character, plot, setting detail etc, and that’s where you as a writer need to drill down and make the tough decisions on how to address the problems that others are finding as they read. One thing that can help you decide is looking at the volume of feedback you’re getting in one way or the other. If only one person says something and others disagree, then maybe you consider not making any changes based upon that comment, though that’s still a decision you make and own at the end of the day. When you have multiple people honing in on the same issue, you know it’s a significant barrier. Sometimes the feedback you’re getting will present an obvious (not necessarily simple or easy) solution to the problem people are experiencing with the story in question – i.e. take an unlikeable character that people don’t want to read about and make them more likeable. Sometimes the solution is going to be a little more sideways: adjusting an earlier scene to make a character’s actions or a plot point more understandable. And sometimes there will be multiple things you can do to help smooth the readers’ experience; you may have several options and only need to make one of those changes to address a problem, or you may have several things that must be fixed to solve a problem. In this case, you have Q, who has received a pretty unified reaction from RE. You’ve said that you don’t want to change Q’s personality significantly, so I assume you believe something in the story will not work if you do (although, sometimes radical changes to the story are the answer, so don’t write the possibility off just yet!); you’ve gotten feedback elsewhere that some people do like Q. So, what can you do to make Q more palatable who don’t like him while preserving what people do like about him, or preserving whatever he needs for the story to function? You’ve already identified a couple of options, which are to radically change his personality or to dial him back only somewhat. But you could also look at things like making his motivations clearer, which may may make him seem more interesting or sympathetic; you could change the fight scenes so that they feel like present a genuine danger. You could give us an entirely different character to start with especially since you already have plans for other POVs; he might be easier to swallow if readers are already invested in other characters. You could trim these first chapters into a single chapter so that they’re less of a barrier to entry. Etc. Point is, you know you have a problem, so it’s time to figure out why you have a problem, and what readers need to keep reading. Fortunately, critique groups are a great way to do that, because you can literally ask us! What, specifically, do readers like about Q? What do they not like about him? Is that thing a minor annoyance or would it make you put the book down? What needs to change so you would not put the book down? What do you want to see more of? Same goes for all the other elements of your story. I’m being pretty general here because it’s not my story and I have to be, but you can ask specific questions in areas where it might form your decision. Also, don’t worry about explaining to us why things are the way they are, unless you think it’s essential context to a question you might ask or a decision you’re unsure of. Whether or not the question/issue/etc. raised by a reader is explained or justified later in a book, they’re still giving you valuable information about how they’re experiencing the book now. It doesn’t matter if you have an excellent justification on page 106 if the reader doesn’t believe in your book enough to keep reading after page 52. In my personal experience, I’ve found it a much better use of my time to ask clarifying questions or float possible edits past my readers than explain things to them that I really should have made clear in the manuscript. And it leads to fewer frustrated critique partners. Even with the best of intentions, an explanation or justification for something in your manuscript can easily come across as arguing with readers about what they experienced and can discourage them from providing future feedback. And yes: Revising is a lot of work. Addressing the feedback you get may take changing characters’ personalities, changing the ending, changing the beginning, overhauling the structure, or cutting characters, chapters, or subplots altogether. It means a lot of time and hard decisions and figuring out how to deal with differing opinions and contradictory feedback. There is just no way to avoid that if you want to get a saleable manuscript out into the world. Onto the critique: My biggest concern with the story to this point is that I am not engaged. Nothing in either the previous chapters nor this scene has told me what drives Q or makes him tick; he’s portrayed as effortlessly competent so I have no reason to wonder about the outcome of the fight scenes; he’s portrayed as an objectively horrible person and isn’t particularly enjoyable to be around, so I have no reason to root for him. I also don’t have the context to appreciate the worldbuilding that is happening in this scene: What are the AoDs? Why does does it mean that they appear to be after him? One of the things you can do to help address this is to give some serious thought to the pacing. The story so far has been almost continuous combat. This doesn’t allow for much in the way of changes in tone or feel, but more importantly it leaves very little room for character development or worldbuilding. At over 7k words in, I should have a solid idea of what drives the main characters and what their struggles are, and I don’t have that yet. This might (or might not) assist with making Q someone I to spend more time with, whether because I like him more or because he’s interesting for me to spend time with despite not liking him. Another thing that could increase the tension is making the outcome more uncertain. At no point have I doubted the outcome; it’s always seemed clear that Q would prevail and he does this with relative ease. Even though he gets captured the end, he took on several of what we’re lead to believe were quite fearsome entities before being captured, killed creatures that he didn’t know could die, and it felt like he got captured as much because the chapter needed to end as because he couldn’t keep fighting. As I read: I assume Q’s coat must be made of some special material if he can just casually absorb being shot multiple times in the chest. Okay, so the end of Ch4 was a fine line to end a chapter on, but not sure why a chapter break is needed if the next scene picks up immediately where the other one left off, especially since we’ve only had a single, relatively short scene. First paragraph of Ch5: tense shifts from past to present in this paragraph before shifting back. We’re getting almost no information on what’s happening around Q and the other combatants. I’d sort of assumed before that this was because he was in a somewhat isolated area, back-alley style, before, but now that Q is running through the streets it’s very noticeable. Surely they are other people observing and reacting to all this? If the ghost needs to avoid physically running into people, can’t it just fly a few meters above the street and go at whatever pace it wants? “How’d you find me?” Didn’t Q say that he spend almost all of his time between jobs on this planet? And one of the first things he did was went to talk to an established contact. He certainly does not seem to be making much effort to hide himself. The dialogue between M and V at the end feels very “as you know, Bob”/infodumpy- too much time spent on laying out exactly who wants Q and what’s to be done with him, which surely the characters should know already;, and not enough emotion in the dialogue and the characters’ actions, if we’re supposed to interpret this as an emotional argument on M’s part. Also puzzled as to why Q doesn’t even try to escape while they’re standing around talking about him. At no point during this fight does he seem convincingly defeated.

Yeah, I was just going to say this. Nothing wrong with playing around with stuff in the public domain, but, especially with really well-known stuff like Lovecraft's work, it's really hard to cherry-pick; not an issue if you're setting out to write a Lovecraft-esque story, but if you're just looking to borrow one or two things it might be difficult to convince readers that it's not a Lovecraftian story, if that makes sense.

Haven't read the sub yet (sorry! I will, swear!) but I have a SavageWorlds superhero character who can do this.

Yes exactly. For every submission of yours, you need to provide at least one critique of another's work to participate. No hard and fast rule beyond that. That said, as @shatteredsmooth said the group definitely functions better when everyone does more than the bare minimum; we encourage everyone to participate as fully as possible, but we recognize that it's not always possible.

Yep, Shard sometimes decides that it just doesn't want to ping someone in a post, @ symbol or no. No solution that I've found. Good to go for this week, then, just making sure you're aware and it's on your radar. @Snakenaps Seeing no objections, I think you're okay for this time. For context for our newer members: we generally try to stick fairly close to our 5000 word limit. Occasionally, when someone has a chapter that's close-ish, you'll see someone ask to submit something that's a few hundred words over if they really don't have a logical place to split it up, at which point we usually just do an informal vote in the thread here. 6200 words is well above where we'd normally ask someone to split, but November is generally a quiet month and comments from the rest of the group so far have said they're okay with it. But, be aware subs of this length are the exception, not the rule

@Snakenaps Good to submit. Anybody mind if the submission is a little over at 5,500 words this week, folks? @Aspiring Writer, before you submit again make sure you're also responding to others' subs! (I know there have only been two others for you so far.) We ask that provide a minimum of one critique to another writer on here for every chapter they submit. The group only works if everyone participates on both ends

To be fair, I read all the other ones...